I invested in some cheap circular screw in 10 stop ND filters last week, so I took a trip down to St Monans, to check out the famous breakwater. Unfortunately high tide did not coincide with either sunrise or sunset, so had to make do with a rather dullish day as high tide was at 4pm.
Anyway, here is one of the more interesting shots of the breakwater:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 2 by Brian Innes
It will be interesting to see other peoples take on this image. Might be one I submit to my local photographic associations competitions next season.
Very happy with the screw in ND filters though. Not as easy to use as a square slot in filter, but a tiny fraction of the price, and no noticeable colour cast either!
Used the brand new GIMP2.10 to introduce some drama.
I left some brush marks on the sea to show my work! One can of course get rid of them if one is careful.
I’m always amazed at how strong the Canon AA filter is over their sensors. Maybe the 5Ds is a bit different? Anyways, it feels like I have to apply far too much sharpening to get something to “pop”. Hence the noise. I can never seem to get the right balance. Oh well.
Having said that, this was processed first in RawTherapee to get two copies, one for the foreground and the other for the sky. Then into the Gimp to blend the sky to the foreground, to crop the scene, to mask the various portions of the grayscale to use as the basis for dodge and burn masks, followed by a bit more fudging of tones in two regions, with a top off of again using masks, this time as a way of applying three different color samples - platinum/palladium for the highlights, brown tones from a photogravure for the mid-tones, and good old fashioned cold silver print tints for the shadows. In all, it probably took 20 mins or so of fiddling around with to get something I thought might “work.”
Interesting photograph to work with. Thanks for letting us play around with it.
I found the raw file underexposed by almost 2 EV, that too bad that the exposition compensation was set to -2.0EV in the camera. Less noise would have come up in the final picture. @Brian_Innes what was the reason of this -2.0EV compensation ?
Anyway I think that’s a fine picture and it was fun to work on it.
Thanks for a great photo to play with.
First time I have edited in months!
There is loss of detail/darkening on the breakwater in the foreground because of reducing image size.
Images such as this remind me of WW1 photography, so first I switched off base curve.I used colour correction for a sepia tone effect, vignette, default graduated density. Denoise(profiled), pushed levels to the right a bit for a gloomy tone, masked the sky in tone curve (med contrast).
Nothing extreme, just little nudges in tones.
Do you have another image with a longer exposure time, giving a more mirror like effect on the ocean?
in the camera. Less noise would have come up in the final picture. 
